This IS a great thread !! I am a BIAB brewer, so some of it is not 100% applicable to my system, but it is all nicely documented and if I ever decide to mash differently, I will start here. Can I ask about 3/4 cup of priming sugar? My last 2 batches of brown ale were disappointing .. not from taste so much as carb and head. I used a calculator which gave me the sugar amount for the style and desired volume of CO2, but it was less than I like in a beer. How do you figure 3/4 cup? Is it from a calculator?

If you're going to be packaging this beer within a couple of weeks, it'll be fine, just let it settle. Any mechanical advantage you have toward clarity will be offset (bigtime, in my opinion) by the chances of infection and oxidation that come with racking to another vessel.

I wish that this home brewing myth would die. Oxidation is only a major problem after been has been filtered. The chance of oxidizing a beer that still contains yeast cells is slim to none. The amount of oxygen that is picked up during racking to a secondary fermentation vessel is very very small, and any oxygen that is picked up will be rapidly scrubbed from the beer by the yeast cells that are still in suspension. Another thing that home brewers overlook is that green beer contains dissolved CO2. Anyone who has ever racked beer to a secondary fermentation vessel has experienced what appears to be a restart of fermentation. What one is seeing is dissolved CO2 coming out solution. That off-gasing is purging oxygen from the fermentation vessel.